Have you ever had an experience with a teacher, coach or mentor that you left feeling more confused or overwhelmed, to the point you weren’t sure in which direction to go? I know I have, and it taught me a valuable lesson in how others may perceive my coaching and mentoring.
We all have our own unique learning styles or ways that we like to learn. In many instances, it comes down to how we transfer information into knowledge that gets lost in golf. It has been the norm for a golf teacher to stand on the lesson tee for an hour giving information to a player/student faster than the player can absorb or comprehend what is being said. Unfortunately, it is more of the desire of the teacher to let the student know how much he or she knows than whether they are learning. You may have been on the receiving end on this type of exchange. If so, what was going through your head? Did you check out? Get so frustrated that you could not get it? Or maybe you were lucky, you may have walked away thinking, what a great lesson, I learned a lot. Well that is until you went to play afterwards, and nothing worked!
So, I would ask, did you learn anything? Over 20 years ago I had a great mentor once tell me that information that is geared for helping someone is not as valuable as information that is geared for helping someone help themselves. Bam! This changed how I was “teaching” at the time and lead me down the road of understanding how important it is to allow someone the space to learn. Golf is a tough sport to learn, due to all the variables that are necessary to understand their causality. We never hit the same shot twice! Regardless of how well you do in a session with a teacher or coach, it is more important that you can go out on your own and apply it, discovering how the variables may affect the desired outcomes.
In conclusion, if you find yourself in the situation where you are wanting to learn, insist the coach get out of your way to learn! Improvement takes time, it takes many hours of working on the right things for you. Learning is a two-way street; it takes effort on the coach and the player for the learning to take place. If you can not articulate why you are doing what a coach has asked you do or give a representation of the information, it is likely you are not learning!
Enjoy Your Journey!
